A Place Like Any Other
by celticfox
Summary: Another survivor, after the War.


**Could be Susan or Romana, or some random OC. You decide. And then review telling me which one you decided on.**

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1.

She's not sure why she's here; she's not even very sure where 'here' is. She's not very sure of anything.

'Here' is a place like any other; a city, up north, with snow in the winter. Many people call this place home. It is, she thinks, as good a starting point as any.

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2.

It's not a very kind city. Kindness is out of style now, and has been for a few centuries.

She works in an office, writing code for computers. She can't really remember how she got the job- she can't remember applying, or being interviewed, or anything like that. She just started working there one day. She thinks.

No one ever says anything to her, and she has nothing to say to them. Occasionally, words sleet past and she tries to grab them, but they're very slippery and hard to hold on to.

Still, it's a job, and it pays the rent on her tiny, dingy apartment that she can't remember renting.

As she drifts through the streets, people pass her, each one safely encased in their own private universe. She is buffeted about, a wandering asteroid, pulled around by the gravity of planet-like people, but orbiting none of them. She longs for the life of a satellite, pulled into someone else's universe.

No one in the entire city knows her name, but that's all right, because she doesn't know it either.

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3.

There's something about mirrors. She avoids them.

And clocks. Clocks get on her nerves. She's afraid that if she listens too long, she'll start hearing the tick of the universe, and she'll be trapped, unable to tear her mind away.

Sometimes, when she's at home, she likes to lie on the warped wooden planks of the floor and listen to the skittering thoughts of spiders.

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4.

The city is big enough to have its own spaceport, and sometimes in her wanderings she finds herself passing through, gazing at the names of far-off destinations. Alpha Centauri, she whispers, trying out the names. Sirius. Abydos. Betelgeuse. Barcelona. She trembles as she says it softly- _Earth._

None are the place she is looking for, and eventually she wanders out again.

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5.

She's not sure how long she's been here; it seems to be always winter, always a cold that bites at her skin and at what might be called her soul. The days seem to drift by, funneling away into the deep black hole of the past. Except for sunsets. She likes sunsets; they remind her of the place she is looking for.

It's also the only time she can see the sun through the clouds.

Sometimes it snows (or does it snow all the time? the fragile memory winks in and out of sight, like a firefly). When that happens, she stands on the pavement and looks up at the falling white, seeking to quantify the feeling of vertigo.

People, she thinks, are quite like snowflakes: they think they are all unique, but really they're just a miniscule part of a shapeless mound of white.

She is vaguely aware that this is not the commonly held view.

For the first time, she wonders: is she human?

Then the thought slips away, and she is left staring at the blankness, metaphorically represented by the snow.

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6.

Sometimes, snatches of things drift into her increasingly unreliable mind. Little things. The sound of laughter. The feeling of pulling a brush through thick hair. His smile.

Once in the autumn she found a maple leaf, caught in a gutter. She picked it up, tracing the delicate tracery of veins with gentle fingers. For a moment it flashed a shining silver, and then it was ordinary and brown and dead again, and she threw it down into the gutter again and stamped on it, and there was water flowing down her face even though it wasn't raining.

Sometimes she thinks she's on the verge of remembering something very important: a message, a warning. Something terrible is going to happen unless she can pass on the warning.

But she can't remember what it its.

She blinks, spring flickers by, and then it's winter again. It's always winter. She can't remember it ever being different.

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End file.
